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The South’s Gunboat War

When Matthew Fontaine Maury, one of America’s most famous scientists but a naval officer of middling rank, accepted the position as head of the Confederacy’s coastal defense in 1861, he did so knowing that storms were ahead — of the political variety. His new post meant he would be reporting to two men with whom he had butted heads in pre-secession days: Stephen Mallory, secretary of the Confederate Navy, and Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy’s new president.

The three had been engaged in nasty, often personal political warfare since the 1850s, when the Floridian Mallory chaired the Senate Naval Affairs Committee, the Mississippian Davis served as secretary of war and senator, and the Virginian Maury supervised the National Observatory. Those acrimonious personal relationships, which were of minor consequence in Washington, now promised to define, and potentially derail, the Confederacy’s naval and coastal-defense strategies.

Library of CongressMatthew F. Maury

As president of the Confederacy, the West Point-educated Davis had little use for a navy; his interests ended with privateers and letters of marque. Mallory had a different vision: he saw his nascent navy as someday constituting a fleet of commerce raiders, iron-sheathed floating fortresses and ocean-going ironclads to smash the blockade and terrorize Northern ports — what today we would call a “blue-water” navy.

Then there was Maury. From the day he reported to Virginia Governor John Letcher shortly after Virginia seceded, the pudgy, badly limping, balding man pushed a strong line on internal defense, particularly of the harbors, rivers and inlets that girded and suffused Confederate territory — what strategists would later call a “brown-water” or “green-water” navy. Maury’s position was hardly surprising: internal defense was an area he had given much thought to and testimony about over the previous decade.

Maury’s strategy was composed of in three layers: mines (called torpedoes at the time) and other obstructions to secure ports and waterways; well-placed coastal artillery, but not heavy fortifications; and fast, maneuverable gunboats to sting invaders. Upon arriving in his new post, he immediately began putting it in place, starting by re-positioning the big guns seized at Virginia’s Gosport Shipyard (later renamed the Norfolk Naval Shipyard) — a move that Mallory approved, along with inexpensive mines deployed in nearby waters.

The gunboats, however, were another matter. They cost real money, money that Mallory believed better spent on raiders, like the Florida, and iron plating for the captured Merrimack, which was soon rechristened as the Confederacy’s first ironclad, the Virginia. As for Davis, his spending priority was always the armies in Virginia, Tennessee and along the Mississippi. If the money had to come from “his” navy, so be it. Gunboats, Davis said, were off the table.

The tension between Mallory and Davis, both from Deep South cotton states, and men like Letcher and Maury, from the Upper South state of Virginia, was more than personal. It embodied a fundamental problem at the heart of the Confederacy, namely the relationships among the states and the relationship between the states and the central government.

In late May, 1861, and at Virginia’s invitation, Davis arrived in Richmond to make it the Confederacy’s capital. Over the next few weeks, on trains, in canal boats, in stage coaches and on horseback, members of his cabinet and the Confederate Congress trickled into the city, welcomed by the governor and the leaders of the secession convention. But the bonhomie did not last long. Virginia controlled the enormous armory at Harper’s Ferry, which the central government demanded it hand over. Nor did Virginians take to the Confederate plan to
revert to the old ranks of the United States Army and Navy, which they saw as a step away from Southern independence.

Neither side thought much of the other. In his diary, Mallory wrote: “From all I can learn here, Gov. Letcher’s conduct must be the result of lack of judgment. It is indefensible — a traitor or a fool might equally act as he does and he is not a traitor.” Nor did Virginia’s leaders hold much respect for the new leaders in Richmond. As the events of early summer 1861 unfolded, a bitter Maury said, the Confederate government was riddled with “small men.” He wrote in his diary: “You may rely upon it, the Confederate States Government has come here feeling that there is between it and us something of an antagonism.” He was right, and it exploded first over Maury’s and the state’s insistence on building gunboats to defend its waterways.

While Mallory thought “small,” in Maury’s words, about coastal defense, the coastal-defense commander dreamed large. Maury did not want a ship “stout enough to keep the sea.” Instead, he envisioned “steam launches each capable of carrying two rifled pivot guns and no more. Their structure should be simple and plain and as economical as possible. They should be literally nothing but floating gun carriages,” with crews of 40 and no accommodations. It was a take-off on his 1851 proposal to build 25 “smart, active steamers,” a patrolling “coast guard” to defend the Eastern Seaboard.

Library of CongressBow gun on the deck of the Teaser, a Confederate gunboat

Through his “big gun and little ship” plan, the commander wanted to turn the ships loose in the Chesapeake Bay’s shallow waters and North Carolina’s tidal rivers and sounds. Shipwrights in the bay counties would be the primary builders, and they could do the work, along with soldier-artisans about to go into winter quarters.

“Going out like a nest of hornets,” he wrote, “they will especially, if the building and the fitting out be kept from the enemy, either sink, capture or drive away from the Chesapeake and its tributaries the whole fleet which the enemy now has or probably will in that time in these waters.” Once that was done, the “nest of hornets” could close off maritime traffic through the Virginia capes, starve out Fortress Monroe and threaten Washington.

To prepare the way for his gunboats, Maury, writing as “Ben Bow,” used the influential Richmond Enquirer to blast the administration’s moves to date as “mere makeshifts” when it came to coastal defense.

Mallory retaliated by ordering Maury to travel to Cuba to buy weapons, a trip that would take him out of the loop for weeks, if not months. But Maury’s political patron, the former president John Tyler, and Charles M. Conrad, his ally in the Confederate Congress and the chair of the House Naval Affairs Committee (and a former United States secretary of war), declared the commander was too valuable to send out of the country. Mallory backed down — for now.

Maury next turned to Letcher and his allies in the Virginia Convention. In the wake of the latest debacle on the Carolina coast at Port Royal, in which the Union captured a huge swath of territory with little opposition, he lobbied even more strenuously for his gunboats. Eventually the Confederate House and Senate approved $2 million to build 100 vessels. On Christmas Eve, Davis signed the bill putting Maury in charge of building the gunboat fleet.

Like the money set aside to rebuild the Merrimack and the hundreds of thousands more to build floating fortresses to defend New Orleans, this was a high-stakes roll of the dice. Everything went well at first. Tyler happily reported that Maury had “woven a proud chaplet around her brow by having won a name all over the world which reflects new luster on the name of Virginia” by advocating the state’s strong defense.

But when members of the Virginia Convention approached Mallory about progress on the gunboats, the secretary reported that his agents were scouring the countryside for engines. By the start of 1862, supplies, especially boilers and the heavy oak for the hulls, proved difficult to come by. And fears of new Union attacks in Virginia led to the rejection of Maury’s idea to free soldiers with carpentry skills from Army duties in the winter.

Despite these setbacks, construction began on the Mattaponi and Pamunkey Rivers, and also along the Rappahannock and at Gosport. Talbott & Brothers, a large Richmond foundry, delivered five double engines in February 1862. During this period, Maury advertised for “negro laborers to cut timber for the vessels.”

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But Maury’s project soon ran into even bigger problems. The battle between the Virginia (nee Merrimack) and the Monitor in March 1862 led the Confederate Congress to demand heavier ironclads for harbor defense and oceangoing ironclads like Britain’s Warrior and France’s Glorie. Wooden gunboats were useless in the face of the Monitor’s firepower.

The most pressing issue, though, was the Union’s Peninsula Campaign, which had landed unmolested at Fortress Monroe in the spring of 1862 and marched haltingly but steadily toward Richmond. In late May the Union captured Norfolk, and the Virginia, docked nearby and unable to escape, was scuttled. Mallory’s ironclad strategy was in shambles.

Maury, sensing an opening, pushed hard for more gunboats, especially if coupled with mines attached to long spars at the boats’ bow. And he pushed the other planks in his strategy, particularly the use of electrically detonated mines. But the Union soon turned on Maury, too. As the Army marched north, it set fire to Maury’s small “gunboat shipyards” along the way; of the 15 vessels under construction, no more than two escaped.

After the Union march on Richmond was thwarted in July, Davis and Mallory deemed Maury’s gunboats irrelevant. The money was needed elsewhere. What use to them was Maury in Richmond? They correctly gauged that support for the gunboats inside the uniformed Navy was waning. Maury, sensing the inevitable, reported that his project was dead and asked Mallory for a new assignment. “He thought I would be of use doing nothing,” Maury reported. Instead he was ordered to Britain to acquire ships for the Confederacy, where he whiled away the rest of the war.

The “gunboat war” was over, with no clear-cut winners, only burned hulls, sunken ironclads, two of the South’s largest ports and its largest shipyard in enemy hands — and a depleted Confederate Treasury.

John Grady, a former editor of Navy Times and a retired director of communications at the Association of the United States Army, is completing a biography of Matthew Fontaine Maury. He is also a contributor to the Navy’s Civil War Sesquicentennial blog.

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